The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a 544-page picture book, and it is a fantastic, magical adventure. In 1930s Paris, twelve-year-old orphan Hugo Cabret lives a secret life behind the walls of the city’s train station. His job is to maintain the station’s many clocks, but his passion is repairing a small mechanical man that his deceased father found in a museum attic. If it ever works, the automaton’s gears will turn and it will write a message; in his grief and loneliness, Hugo believes this will somehow be a message from his father. When he is caught stealing wind-up toys for mechanical parts from the station’s toy booth, Hugo’s life changes forever. Put to work by the crotchety old toymaker and befriended by the toymaker’s inquisitive goddaughter, sensitive Hugo begins to emerge from his shell and make some intriguing connections between the toymaker’s true identity, his father’s history, and his own future. Along the way, author Brian Selznick pushes the boundaries of what the picture book can do. Subtitled A Novel in Pictures and Words, sections of the story are conveyed through silvery charcoal illustrations that zoom in and out as your turn the pages like a film on a screen. Cinema is a theme of the story, and movie stills—especially those from early French filmmaker Georges Méliès’ whimsical A Trip to the Moon—are interspersed throughout the book, as are archival photographs of the Paris of the day. More than an illustrated or graphic novel, the combination of written word and visual image is wholly unique to The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and it’s a combination that won the book the 2008 Caldecott Medal for best illustrated children’s break. Elegant, sophisticated, and charming from cover to cover, this genre-busting book is breaking new ground.

posted Jun 22, 2010 at 1:33PM

Even though this book has a lot of pictures and not many pages of words it is still a veryt interesting book!

posted Jun 24, 2011 at 3:45PM

This is a book about a 12-year-old boy named Hugo Cabret who lives in a train station. Long ago, his father discovered a broken automaton (a windup machine that can do things like imitating animals, etc.) that he believes can write. Both Hugo and his father are excited to see what poem or riddle this machine can produce when it is fixed, but his father dies trying to fix it. Can Hugo do this tricky task on his own before someone realizes that he is living in the train station all by himself? What's unusual about this book is that it's not just a novel, but a mix of a novel with just words and a graphic novel with just pictures. When something exciting is happening, the author switches from words to pictures, which makes the story up to you to interpret.

posted Jul 27, 2011 at 11:38AM

This book was really good. It was a really fast read with all of the pictures. The story is so good because it is different with picture and words in one big book. I recommend it to anyone of all ages because of the heartwarming story.

posted Jun 3, 2012 at 6:40PM

a story you will never forget

posted Jul 31, 2012 at 6:49PM

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